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Scholars, Concepts and Discoveries: a 3 X 3 Silhouette Scholars, Concepts and Discoveries A 3 x 3 Silhouette Rede uitgesproken door Professor Harry van der Laan bij het afscheid van de Universiteit Leiden gehouden op 30 november 2001. 1.1 1.2 1.3 PROLOOG Herman Martin Jan Hendrik DOOYEWEERD RYLE OORT p.4 p.13 p.19 2.1 2.2 2.3 Modal ERAS Inflation Structure p.8 p.11 p.17 3.1 3.2 3.3 Nonthermal Quasars CMB EPILOOG Radio Sources p. 5 p. 9 p. 15 p. 20 Remembering Henk van de Hulst and Mayo Greenberg 2 Scholars, Concepts and Discoveries PROLOOG Mijnheer de Decaan, Familie, Vrienden, Collega’s en Bestuurders, Dames en Heren, Op deze catheder stond ik dertig jaar geleden, mijn vrouw Diane en kinderen van 10 en 6 plus mijn ouders in de voorste rijen. Nu sta ik hier en zie mijn vrouw Renate en twee kinderen van 9 en 7, met schoonouders in diezelfde rijen. In dezelfde toga, none the worse for wear, en ik hoor u denken: ‘Harry jongen, je bent niet ver gekomen.’,maar dat is een misverstand: waar het om gaat is de levensweg, ‘Der Weg ist das Ziel’ en bovendien zitten de kinderen van toen hier ook, met partners, en schitterende kleinkindertjes op schoot of bij de oppas! Dertig jaar ouder zijn we alle- maal die vòòr 1971 werden geboren; dus weinig te treuren, veel te vieren, wat mij betreft. Vanaf mijn geboorte in een gehucht bij een dorp in Westerwolde in 1936 tot 1943 toen ik eindelijk naar school mocht, heb ik mijn moedertaal geleerd en gesproken; dat is een prachtig, subtiel dialect. Mijn hele leven heb ik vooral in mijn tweede en derde taal moeten werken en dat doe ik vandaag ook. Mede omdat er veel collega’s/gasten uit andere landen hier zijn, en omdat het Engels de lingua franca van de wetenschap is, gebruik ik dat voor mijn drie bij drie silhouet, doch Nederlands voor deze proloog en de epiloog. Nadenkend over dit uur ontdekte ik al gauw dat er duizend verhalen zijn, van heel vaktechnisch tot praatjes bij plaatjes, filosofisch tot autobiografisch. Dertig jaar gele- den heb ik afgezien van alle audio-visuele hulpmiddelen. De verleiding voor astronomen, u met prachtige beelden te boeien en eventueel te intimideren, wilde ik ook nu weerstaan. Autobiografie is een riskant genre, terughoudendheid is geboden. Er blijven echter veel mensen en onderwerpen over die bij de formele afsluiting van een astronomisch professoraat aanlokkelijk zijn. Voor mij is dit niet het einde van mijn werkend leven, ik ben reeds jaren geleden begonnen met activiteiten waarmee ik nu gewoon verder kan. Dit verhaal is dan ook geen afscheid, maar eenvoudig een markering van een tijdstip waar de regelgeving een fase-verandering voorschrijft. U hebt op een los blad in de symposiumfolder een overzichtje gekregen van de ele- menten van dat silhouet; u zult vanzelf merken welke hink-stap-sprong route ik kies, er zijn altijd nog meer dan 40 000 mogelijkheden wanneer ik linksboven begin. And now from my second to my third language. What I wish to do is pay tribute to three great scholars to whom I owe very much; to refer very briefly to three concepts that played a major role during my working life and to describe three discoveries that were made when I was young and that worked wonders in astroscience ever since. Scholars, Concepts and Discoveries 3 1.1 Herman Dooyeweerd Philosophy, the love of wisdom and insight turned into theoretical thought, attracted me from an early age. I remember as an eighteen-year-old immigrant boy, in the lunch- break from work in a London Ontario shoe factory, reading Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Man on a park bench, a secondhand paperback I had bought for 75 cents, under- standing little but fascinated by the grand ideas and the intricacy of the arguments. In the Dutch Calvinist tradition of my family, the wisdom of the Gospels was consid- ered applicable in all of life, including scholarship. Abraham Kuyper, the nineteenth- century theologian, institute builder, politician and statesman was a hero and Amsterdam’s Free University philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd perceived to be the most incisive articulator of Kuyper’s key concept of sphere sovereignty. I started to study Dooyeweerd’s work while enrolled in a Canadian undergraduate math and physics programme; I continued struggling with him while a research student in Martin Ryle’s group in Cambridge, but found that Ph.D. ambitions did not leave the time and freedom necessary to grasp Dooyeweerd’s comprehensive theory of every- thing. That had to wait. The plan for a philosophy postdoc period took hold; it was realized in the academic year ‘63-’64 by way of a Canadian appointment that began with a year’s leave of absence at half salary. That year I ploughed through all of Dooyeweerd’s three volume New Critique of Theoretical Thought, attended lectures by Dooyeweerd associates and rivals, participated in a seminar led by Dooyeweerd and professor Cees van Peursen from Leiden and became totally involved in philosophical debates. Wonderful intel- lectual vistas that rivalled Cambridge astronomy’s. Herman Dooyeweerd (* 1894) graduated in Law at the Free University at the age of nineteen and gained his doctorate with a major work on Constitutional Law five years later. After three years of crafting legislation in the Ministry of Labour he became deputy director of the thinktank of one of Kuyper’s legacies, the ARP, a political party that right until its merger into today’s Christian Democratic Appeal in the 1970s, had an influence out of all proportion to its size (typically 8 to 10 % of parliamentary seats). This influence it owed to the powerful intellectual culture to which Dooyeweerd made a major contribution, between the age of 26 and 32! In 1926 Dooyeweerd was appointed to a full professorship at his alma mater, with the charge of legal philosophy, Dutch legal history and encyclopedia of law. He held this chair till his seventieth birthday, that is for nearly forty years. Herman Dooyeweerd had incredible intellectual strength and corresponding physical stamina: he developed an entirely original ontology, a razorsharp epistemology and a 4 Scholars, Concepts and Discoveries rich anthropology, resulting in a three volume opus called The Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea, as early as 1936. At the same time writing prolifically on legal theo- ry, tackling basic issues such as juridical causality and sources of law in their discipli- nary technicalities as well as analysing them historically and philosophically. In addi- tion to his writings of more than 200 books and scholarly papers, Dooyeweerd was an untiring lecturer in four languages, travelling widely in Europe and North America till his death in his 84th year. He was also a community builder in the prime fifty years of his life. Most impressive about Dooyeweerd are his universal interest, his multidisciplinary competence and his respect for empirical data. I know no philosopher who laboured so hard to understand the essence of all disciplines in the whole spectrum of scholarly endeavours nor one who contributed so fundamentally to their foundations, from theology, history, law and the social sciences to biology, physics and mathematics. The explosion of knowledge after the 1950s has made it impossible in practice for even a genius to be such a homo universalis nowadays. Dooyeweerd was a gentleman of style and refined aesthetic appreciation. He enjoyed intellectual debate and loved to be informed about specific scientific discoveries, always attempting to place them in the structured context where their interfaces have maximum richness. He was abundantly honoured and praised, e.g. by the onetime president of our Royal Academy, the famous jurist Langemeijer of this university, who wrote for Dooyeweerd’s seventieth birthday that, while he himself comes from a total- ly different worldview, Dooyeweerd is the most original philosopher Holland has pro- duced, even Spinoza not excepted. Giorgio Delvecchio, Italian neokantian philoso- pher of world repute, called Dooyeweerd the most profound, innovative and pene- trating philosopher since Kant. Dooyeweerd’s insights have provided more perspectives and tools in my intellectual life than any others. 3.1 Nonthermal Radio Sources In nature, sources of emission come in many kinds: the most common are warm bod- ies that radiate according to Planck’s law, such as the body next to you or the sun- warmed wall in an English garden. They are sources of infrared and the radio emission is incredibly weak. Hot gasses, called plasmas, found for example on the surfaces of stars, radiate because their free electrons suffer from all sorts of agitation, accelerations which cause them to radiate by mechanisms that bear exotic names like Cerenkov radiation and bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation. When in the 1930s develop- ments in radio communications and radar defense systems made highly sensitive radio receiver techniques available, it was not long before the Sun was found to be a strong source of radio emission, of radio interference as it was perceived mostly. Scholars, Concepts and Discoveries 5 That there might be a population of cosmic sources was not predicted and when in the 1940s a few sources were found that were neither earth- nor sun-bound, but fixed on the celestial sphere, there was immediate excitement and the challenge of locating these sources precisely enough to identify them with something visible and known or knowable. The first two were found to be located where stars in the Milky Way were known from optical flares, recorded in ancient chronicles, to have exploded as supernovae; but there was another, in the constellation of Cygnus, that found no such counter- part. This source, named Cygnus A, became a challenge for Martin Ryle’s team at Cambridge to locate so precisely that among the thousands of stars and galaxies on a deep photograph, it could be identified uniquely with one of them.
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